The Story Behind Alec Baldwin Losing The Jack Ryan Role After ‘The Hunt For Red October’

The submarine thriller The Hunt for Red October was a grand slam both critically and commercially for Paramount Pictures in 1990, and it was arguably the first blockbuster of the decade. The John McTiernan-directed film took its $30 million budget and turned it into $200 million at the box office. And when Oscar season rolled around, it picked up three nominations and took home one win for Best Sound Editing. Sean Connery was praised for his portrayal of Soviet Captain Marko Ramius and picked up a British Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

While the movie would go down as another successful entry on an already long list of hits for Connery, it was Alec Baldwin who had the most to prove with his role of mild-mannered CIA analyst Jack Ryan. The 31-year-old actor had already shown flickers of leading man potential with previous roles in Beetlejuice and Married to the Mob, but Red October provided him with the coveted ticket to board the franchise express. The Hunt for Red October was the first book in Tom Clancy’s series with Jack Ryan to be adapted for the big screen, but Baldwin would never get his chance to reprise the popular character. The part would be filled by other leading actors as the years rolled by: Harrison Ford (Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger), Ben Affleck (The Sum of All Fears), and the newest Jack Ryan, Chris Pine (Shadow Recruit). So, how did Baldwin miss out on assuming the part of Clancy’s CIA hero in a string of films that grossed nearly a billion dollars? Well, as Baldwin puts it, “The studio cut my throat.”

The missed opportunity to continue with the Jack Ryan character is something that Baldwin says he’s often asked about by fans, but he usually just gives a “half truth answer.” When Charlie Sheen told Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre to f*ck off, Baldwin felt compelled to write a letter to the TV star, warning him of the mistake he was making. Baldwin recounted that in 1991, he was visiting his mother in Syracuse who had recently been diagnosed with cancer, when he received a call from John McTiernan letting him know that studio executive David Kirkpatrick was talking with an even bigger actor (Harrison Ford) about squeezing Baldwin out of the Jack Ryan role. That’s when things got ugly.

“On the phone, John told me that during the period of the previous few months, he had been negotiating to do a film with a very famous movie star who had dropped out of his film days before so that he could go star in the sequels to The Hunt For Red October. John further told me that Paramount owed the actor a large sum of money for a greenlit film that fell apart prior to this, and pushing me aside would help to alleviate that debt and put someone with much greater strength at the box office than mine in the role. I sat there mildly stunned because not only was I in an active negotiation with Paramount, but for them to negotiate simultaneously with another actor was against the law.”

@Stonecutter
Red Storm Rising was outstanding, though, to be fair, a full feature film about an all-conventional World War III between the United States and the Soviet Union would be pretty expensive.
He tried to magic with his whole Debt of Honor series that went completely off the rails.

I still want a movie for Without Remorse. But the movie in my head is about 7 hours long and way over budget. Basically, the version of Without Remorse that I want to see would be like the real life version of Tropic Thunder.

Never read the books but the tone of the films shifted dramatically after HFRO. Ryan went from being a smart, bookish analyst to an action hero. I’m not sure if that shift occurred in the books or if the franchise just became more Hollywood. I preferred the slow-burn intensity of HFRO over the action-focused Ford films.

@Bigswerve – Chronologically, Patriot Games (the book) took place before HFRO. I can’t remember if it was published before HFRO and the re-released when HFRO got popular (like happened with Grisham and A Time to Kill getting re-released after The Firm), but Patriot Games is the earliest stuff in the Jack Ryan canon. It never sat well with me that they had an older actor playing Ryan in PG, but it was too early in the franchise to explain to people that PG would’ve been a prequel to HFRO (sort of).

@Bienvenidos, i liked those too, but HFRO is the best of the three if you ask me. I mean, come on, when Ryan goes to Latin American in Clear and Present Danger, he is traipsing in the jungle in a bright windbreaker. No Baldwin, Ryan, would do that.

Every few years I get the urge to reread Rainbow Six, and somehow every time I am surprised that the assault on Definitely Not EuroDisney isn’t even remotely the climax of the book, since it’s always been the most interesting section for me.

Rainbow Six is gutted by Clancy’s increasingly insane political rhetoric. Which is a shame, because it’s one of my favourites of his (Red Storm Rising #1), but the main plot arc with scary vegans is just too silly and may as well be the basis of the Fox News runbook.

@adm.fookbar: You think that’s bad? Try reading Red Rabbit where Clancy basically tries to retcon Jack Ryan and the neoconservative movement to show that they were right about ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING regarding the USSR in the early 1980s, even when they had espoused the exact opposite at the time.

HFRO is in my top 5 all time list. It was one of the few movies I have on tapes as a kid. I also had the awesome gameboy game. Alec Baldwin, despite his personal flaws is flat out amazing and as much as I liked Harrison Ford’s Ryan, I still would have liked Baldwin in it.

I always heard the story that he lost the role as Jack Ryan because he called Michael Eisner the Eighth dwarf, “Greedy”. While Eisner wasn’t in control of paramount at the time anymore.. he still had the sway to take the job from him. And frankly as entertaining as I find Baldwin.. I could seriously see him doing this.